Today, Toshiba, of all manufacturers, announced that it is releasing four HD camcorders. Two of the models, the Toshiba GigaShot GSC-A100F and GSC-A40F, will record 1080i video at Full HD resolution (1920×1080). The other two, the Toshiba GSC-K80H and GSC-K40H, will record HD video at 720P resolution. Like the Sanyo DMX-HD1000, Toshiba’s camcorder forego the more widespread AVCHD format and opt for MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, upon which AVCHD is based.

The two 1080i camcorders, the A100F and A40F, are different from each other only in that the former sports a 100GB hard drive and the latter has a 40GB HDD. At the highest quality, the A100F will record 12 hours of HD footage.

As for the 720p camcorders, the K80H and K40H will record onto 80GB and 40GB hard drives, respectively.

All four Toshiba camcorders feature a 1/3″ CMOS sensor. The A series camcorders have 2.36 megapixel sensors with 1.49 megapixels effective. The K series feature 1.35 megapixel sensors with 920,000 effective pixels.

Toshiba says that their camcorders will be capable of shooting at 60fps, which I’m sure sports fans will absolutely love. All the camcorders will also be capable of recording to SDHC instead of the hard drive.

Digital image stabilization, a 3″ LCD screen, and a 10x optical zoom round out these four new camcorders.

The Toshiba GSC-K80H ($1,111) and GSC-K40H (~$938) will be available in Japan in late October, while the Toshiba GSC-A100F (~$1,632) and GSC-A40F (~$1,372) will be available in the middle of November. There is no word on a U.S. release … yet.

Press release (Japanese) [ via Gizmodo ]